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When Hazel McCallion arrived in Streetsville as a young bride in 1951, the village was changing. Developers were showing up at farmhouses, settling land deals with a handshake.

By the time she became mayor of the fledgling city of Mississauga in 1978, the course had already been set for suburban sprawl. Streetsville and other scattered villages had been melded, and it would be McCallion who would steer their transformation into a metropolis — not as an urban planner, but as a populist with a genius for anticipating what people wanted and a conservative eye on the wallet.

After three decades at the helm, the greatest mark McCallion would leave on the city would not be low-density housing, a forced downtown core, or a reserve fund.

It would be herself.

On Monday, the beloved mayor turns 90. She has indicated this will be her last term. Her career has been marked with success, but of late her reputation has taken a beating. As her last years in office wind down, the mayor’s actions in a land deal involving her son are being aired in an ongoing inquiry.

Through the years, her beliefs about the city have evolved with her voters. In some ways, it is hard to tell where Hazel McCallion ends and Mississauga begins.

Journeaux grew up in Port Daniel, Que., a small Gaspé town. Urbaniak, whowrote Her Worship: Hazel McCallion and the Development of Mississauga, returned with the mayor to her childhood home a few years ago and noted a striking similarity among members of the Journeaux clan: Most shared Hazel’s “tightly constructed lips.”

McCallion was a child when the Great Depression hit. At 12, she was already in charge of payroll for the family fishing business.

They weren’t “desperately poor,” says Urbaniak. “The family was entrepreneurial and active in the community, but there was a prevailing sense of frugality, and I have no doubt that shaped her political personality,”

Of the five children, two became mayors. When Lockhart Journeaux died in a car accident on the way to a council meeting as mayor of Port Daniel, his little sister Hazel was still years away from becoming Streetsville’s mayor.

After high school in Quebec, she attended a secretarial school in Montreal and moved to Toronto in the ’40s to run the office of Kellogg Company, a major construction firm.

Outside of work, she was a joiner. She volunteered much of her time with the Anglican Young People’s Association, where she kept subscriptions of a monthly newsletter up to date and was a club booster. A 1947 profile noted: “It is felt moreover that she will contribute more than the average leader.”

In 1949, the young woman with the “sunny smile” became the first “lady president” of the organization. In being willing to take on responsibility and being pushy but likeable, Hazel found a formula that would serve her throughout the political career to come.

She also found the man whose last name she would make famous. Sam McCallion, a few years younger, was the program research convenor for the Anglican youth organization, and like Hazel wrote for the newsletter.

Sam adopted a breezy tone about how to plan get-togethers: “No party is complete without refreshments ... you might serve ice cream with a rose,” he wrote in 1951.

The woman who had caught his eye wrote with authority: “The aim (of the AYPA) is to promote the religious, social and intellectual welfare of the members,” she pointed out in a 1950 editorial. “Is your branch a group of young people endeavouring to fulfill these requirements or would it be better classified as a social club?”

Already, she had the stern tone mastered.

It didn’t take long for Hazel McCallion to rise to public attention, even at a time when women weren’t often seen in community leadership. By 1964, she was a citizen member of the planning board, and by 1970 she was mayor of Streetsville, winning on a platform of curbing development. She was simultaneously raising three children: Peter, Paul and Linda.

When the province conceived the idea of Mississauga — a municipality destined to swallow Streetsville — she fought to expropriate land for Streetsville to grow into a city in its own right.

It was a fight she could not win, but a popular cause. And that was all that mattered.

When McCallion became a Mississauga councillor in 1974, the city was already beginning its famous pattern of sprawl. The “big three” local developers — Bruce McLaughlin (city centre/Hurontario), E.P. Taylor (Erin Mills), and Markborough Developments (Meadowvale) — had bought up a good portion of the available land in the centre, west side, and northwest corner of the city.

McCallion came in as a reformer, criticizing the lax attitude toward development and pushing for an official plan, Urbaniak said.

When Ron Searle became mayor, McCallion called for development charges and lot levies. She proclaimed the mantra that would become the core of her political mandate: Growth must pay for itself.

“We may be building a city, but then again, we may end up with no people because they won’t be able to afford to live here,” she said in 1978.

McCallion ran for mayor that year. She wanted to bring in more industrial and commercial development, build a second hospital and cap the population (then just 250,000) at 500,000 “so we won’t be crammed in like sardines.”

She beat Searle by 3,000 votes.

A year later, she would face her first big test.

In November 1979, a train carrying chlorine and other dangerous chemicals derailed in Mississauga. The propane exploded and chlorine gas seeped into the air. Some 220,000 people had to be evacuated. McCallion took charge, overseeing the evacuations, and later fighting for tougher transport rules.

With her reputation as the people’s champion thus entrenched, McCallion’s council made a trade-off in 1981. Land that would normally be released for development in stages would be made available all at once, but developers would have to pay levies to cover the cost of new infrastructure such as libraries, parks, roads and community centres.

City and regional staff warned that existing neighbourhoods needed to be built out and the sprawl resulting from this policy would create a car-dependent city, explained Urbaniak. But McCallion and her council voted to take the gamble. Suburbs built on former farm fields that didn’t offend the established neighbourhoods followed.

“In some ways, Hazel actually drove a pretty tough bargain with the developers,” said Neil Thomlinson, a politics professor at Ryerson University. “That was a revolutionary concept.”

But by taking part in debate over the release of land, McCallion made a serious mistake. Some of that land was hers.

In 1982, a judge found that she had committed a "substantial error in judgment" in failing to declare a conflict of interest during council debate over future land releases.

Yet later that year, she was re-elected with 71 per cent of the vote. The people had spoken.

In the years that followed, the libraries, parks and roads kept going in, and the city’s money stayed in the bank.

The development levies and her city’s debt-free status would make her famous, but not for great urban design.

“To be in Paris was a dream come true,” she wrote in the Young Anglican monthly. “Standing on the Place de la Concorde we gazed to the right and beheld the Louvre Palace.”

Thirty years later, Mississauga had no Louvre, or even a commanding town square. It had Square One, suburbs, and a nice waterfront.

“It grew how the developers wanted it to grow,” said Larry Taylor, a former councillor who clashed with McCallion long before her latest tormenter, Carolyn Parrish, was on the scene. “There’s still no downtown and still no sense of city there.”

Taylor, now a real estate broker, remains frustrated about the city that never was. As a councillor in the ’70s and ’80s, he tried to get council on board to redevelop Burnhamthorpe Rd. into something more urbane.

“I wanted something like University Ave., with some water features, a grand boulevard, to know you had entered into the city centre,” he said. “Out of all that, I got the fountain at the library.”

McCallion, says Urbaniak, was no Fiorello LaGuardia — New York’s visionary urban reformer. While she had no specific vision for the city, she wanted to leave her imprint on its downtown, and insisted on building landmarks among the parking lots.

The Civic Centre and Living Arts Centre were the product of international competitions in the late ’80s and early ’90s, built next to the shopping mall that marks the de facto centre of Mississauga.

When the Living Arts Centre was completed, the Star’s Christopher Hume was impressed, but criticized its failure to mesh with the aggressively postmodern Civic Centre, which he called one of the most “remarkable buildings” in Canada.

“(Architect) Zeidler ignored the obvious cues and lapsed into the architectural arbitrariness so typical of Mississauga,” Hume wrote.

Along with arbitrary architecture, McCallion’s Mississauga has not been a great friend to the heritage preservation community.

In 2004, a 160-year-old farmhouse that was not on the city’s list of heritage property was demolished by a developer. Urbaniak writes in his book that between 1994 and 2005, Mississauga did not pursue any designations under the Ontario Heritage Act unless the owner of the property agreed.

But McCallion could be a heritage activist when it counted.

Before the Avro Arrow hanger was torn down in 2004, she tried to get Ottawa to save it. As with the battle for Streetsville, the effort failed. But McCallion was perceived as being on the right side.

And that’s how a mayor gets herself re-elected with 90 per cent of the vote.

“She has a remarkable ability to feel the public pulse, get a sense of emerging movements and pre-empt them. That pre-emption, so shrewdly, has perhaps unwittingly stifled, to some extent, civic engagement,” Urbaniak says.

Matthew Wilkinson, a historian with Heritage Mississauga, says the perception that Mississauga developed haphazardly isn’t fair.

“There is a lot more structure and thought (behind it) than people understand,” he said. “Granted, some of it didn’t work. It doesn’t mean the thought wasn’t there.”

McCallion returned to work and kept herself busy. But the post-millennium era has been difficult.

In 2004, her developer son Peter wanted a landmark of his own, a hotel complex near city hall. His mother came along for meetings with a potential operator and did a good deal more to grease the wheels, according to evidence presented in the current inquiry. But she said she was not there to influence anything other than the public good.

Justice Douglas Cunningham will decide that. His inquiry report is expected within weeks.

“With all this schmozzle going on, I hope and pray she can keep up her strength,” said Bechervaise, who still calls the mayor “Aunt Hazel.”

Perhaps bruised by the negative turn of media coverage lately, McCallion declined to be interviewed on the eve of her 90th birthday.

The zero-tax-increase years are long over. The reserve fund from the boom years is running dry. The infrastructure is aging, and there is little land left to develop. Mississauga’s future will be one of provincially mandated intensification, certain to draw the kind of NIMBY opposition the city has largely avoided for years.

McCallion has acknowledged the city is facing hard times and things need to change. When she turned 88, she told the Star her biggest regret has been lack of transit planning. “You can’t build a public transit system based on single homes,” she said. “You need the density.”

Paul Bedford, Toronto’s former chief planner, says Mississauga is rethinking its land use, and McCallion has been “instrumental” recently in pushing for smart growth.

Sixty years later, the “gal” from the yellowed pages of those newsletters is turning 90. This is her last term in office. The city she built will soon be for others to look after.

McCallion, always a good Christian, will probably be praying for them.

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